pri3o-dmenu-desktop 0.1.2

Drop-in replacement for i3-dmenu-desktop with simple app priorization

pri3o-dmenu-desktop

Description

pri3o-dmenu-desktop is a drop-in replacement for Michael Stapelberg's i3-dmenu-desktop that adds simple application priorization. It supports all options present in i3-dmenu-desktop and a few more.

At this point priority is simply the absolute number times the program was run. For example a program ran three times has a higher priority than a program only run twice. It's very simple but pretty effective. In the future I might add a time-based component as well.

The priority data is stored in a sqlite database in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pri3o-dmenu-desktop/dmenu.db (defaults to ~/.config/pri3o-dmenu-desktop/dmenu.db) but a custom location can be specified via command line parameter. A new db will be create if it does not exist yet.

Requirements

To run this you need Python 3, all used libraries should be present in the standard distribution. Python 3 should already be present in any modern, non-minimal distribution. For older/LTS distributions (e.g. CentOS 7) you may need to install it.

For RedHat based distros this can be done via:

yum install python3

For Debian based distros use:

apt install python3

Installing

The easiest way to install is using pip3:

pip3 install pri3o_dmenu_desktop

Running

Just run using

pri3o-dmenu-desktop [OPTIONS]

If run without parameters, will behave like i3-dmenu-desktop without parameters. The optional commandline parameters are:

• -d, --database=PATH path to database file; default $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pri3o-dmenu-desktop/dmenu.db
• -e, --entry-type=TYPE display "Name" (TYPE=name), "Exec" (TYPE=command) or .desktop filename (TYPE=filename) in dmenu, default name
• -l, --locale=LOCALE use LOCALE (e.g. en_GB) for localisation of "Name", default is system locale
• -m, --dmenu=COMMAND run this command for dmenu, default dmenu -i
• -t, --term=COMMAND use this command for programs that need to be run in a terminal, default i3-sensible-terminal -e

Speed

As some people may wonder about how fast it is:

 % time pri3o-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=/bin/false
pri3o-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=/bin/false  0,06s user 0,01s system 99% cpu 0,070 total

 % time i3-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=/bin/false
i3-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=/bin/false  0,11s user 0,01s system 99% cpu 0,114 total

 % time j4-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=/bin/false
j4-dmenu-desktop --dmenu=/bin/false  0,00s user 0,00s system 97% cpu 0,006 total

On my system (SSD-only) it is slightly faster than i3-dmenu-desktop, but still much slower than j4-dmenu-desktop. For all practical purposes these differences should negligible unless you have a lot of applications and/or a slow hard drive.